Why Yesterday’s Classics Aren’t Appealing to Today’s Kids

I’m still coming down off a high I got the other night. What drug did I take? Reading two chapters of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy out loud with my 10-year-old son James. He loved it. I mean, I think so. Gosh, I hope so. The description of the one-room schoolhouse captured him. He thought it was cool that ‘Manzo had his own two calves, Star and Bright, to care for and train. And he loved the description of the dinner the future husband of Laura Ingalls ate: sizzling ham, piles of baked beans, bread and butter, fresh milk, pumpkin pie. On a school night!

I’m really looking forward to tonight, when I tear him away from his Kindle (on which he plays games) and the books he prefers to read, which involve Wimpy Kids and Goosebumps gore and, well, let’s just say no farm work or frontier values.

I try, at every visit to the library, to draw him toward classics, but he pushes them back at me. Why? Is he the only modern kid unmoved by his parents’ childhood faves?

It seems that kids today (much as I hate that phrase!) may be less apt to pick up so-called classic works of literature. Is it thanks to brain chemistry accustomed to quick-cut cartoons and video games? Or have the books themselves lost what we like to believe is a timeless appeal?

I asked around to see if other parents had experienced this resistance to the classics (hoping we weren’t the only ones that had!). Turns out, there are a few legit, non-video-game-related reasons kids don’t always find old faves compelling at first:

• The covers are less than compelling. My friend Debbie was thrilled when she came across a whole library of kid classics for her son Harry, 9. Who has yet to touch them (while he tears through Percy Jackson books). The book’s jackets, Debbie speculates, are the turnoff. “To me, the colors and illustrations are charmingly old-fashioned. To Harry, they just look old.”

• The action is slow, or slow-er. Laura’s 14-year-old daughter, Zoe, is reading The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s Depression-era classic. “That book was so enlightening to me,” says Laura, “because it was the first time I’d heard about the Dust Bowl.” But to her daughter, the story moves soooo slowly. Which brings up the point: Were there books our parents read avidly or remember from their childhoods that were too slow for us? There’s something to be said for a book being written in a lexicon a modern child — or adult, for that matter — can get hooked into.

• The references are out of date.  Beth, who somehow never read Nancy Drew novels herself as a girl, skimmed a few to preview them when her daughter was at the right age for the teen-sleuth series, and was laughing at things like Nancy’s “charge plate.” (Her daughter — surprise! — wasn’t interested.) Several years ago, reading Beverly Cleary’s Henry and Ribsy with my boys, I had to stop them from laughing about a fifty cent ice cream cone and explain things like inflation to them (not to mention how it was totally normal for a kid Henry’s age to take a city bus by himself!). Farmer Boy is, of course, loaded with mini history and behavior lessons, some fun (yes, the $500 the family earns from a whole season’s worth of potatoes was big money) some less so (yes, kids were hit with rulers at school and had to sit silently at the dinner table).

• The illustrations are fuzzier (or nonexistent).  I tried one of my favorites on my son last year, to no avail (“Mom, I’m sorry, but…”). I thought A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle might grab him with the supernatural storyline. But there was no way “in” for a kid enamored with graphic books (he calls himself a future cartoonist). So how happy was I to discover, in researching this very essay, that a graphic version of Wrinkle, adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson, exists? We’ll be checking that out as soon as we put Farmer Boy down.

All this is not to say that there’s no room on our kids’ shelves for The Call of the Wild. But our kids may need a bit more prompting and nudging. Take Farmer Boy. I tried more than once to entice my son to check the book out on his own, but the cover didn’t grab him. This time, I took it out — and relied on the fact that he still enjoys being read to. Seek out updated editions — heck, try movie versions as a way into the story. Not everything will be a hit, but here’s the good news: There are lots of classics to try.